Villiers Touch

22. Steve Wyatt

Wyatt went over Hackman’s file on Arthur Rademacher for the third time, closed the folder, and sat back to blow smoke out of his nostrils and stare toward the ceiling, going back over it and making sure he had all of it ready on the tip of his tongue. He had to have it letter perfect; there was too much at stake this time to play it by ear. He spent half an hour rehearsing just how he would do it, and in the end he smiled and got up from his couch and sauntered into the bedroom.

She lay curled in a tight knot. Her sleeping face was composed, gentle, reflecting quiet happiness; she made a small curved mound under the sheet. He glanced at the clock and got onto the bed with her, snuggling close, fitting tight against her back; he slid his hand under her arm and cupped her breast.

Anne turned her face up, smiling to herself, her eyes half-closed; she looked warm and drowsy. She moved her shoulder under his chin so he could kiss her. She made him think of all the sagging middle-aged ones he had hustled-she had so much that none of them had ever owned. It was too bad her name had to be Goralski. He printed light kisses on her nose, her cheek, her mouth and chin. Sweet and warm, she turned over slowly, burrowing, and twisted her torso to feed him a saucy little breast. She murmured, “Aren’t you going to take your clothes off?”

He grunted and got out of bed, reaching automatically for a cigarette. Anne’s frown was like a child’s, solemn and innocent. Wyatt lit up and moved to the mirror to check his tie, and she said to him, “You’re smoking too much-do you know you’re smoking almost three packs a day?”

“Now that’s starting, is it?”

“What?”

“Don’t be a nag, darling,” he said, shooting his cuffs and inspecting his teeth in the mirror.

She said, “What are you doing?”

“What do I appear to be doing? I’ve got to go out.”

“Now? Tonight?”

“It’s only eight-thirty.”

She looked in puzzlement at the clock. “So it is. When did I fall asleep?”

“About an hour ago. You were exhausted.”

“As well I might be. You sex maniac.” She was grinning gaily.

“It’s business,” he said, “and very important. I should be back around midnight.”

“Business? On a Saturday night?”

“Don’t you believe me?” He gave her a warm look of amusement. “I suppose you think I’ve got energy left over to go out and rape some other woman.”

“But what kind of business could-”

“I don’t want to talk about it now.”

“Why not, darling?”

“I just don’t,” he said. “I haven’t time. I’ll see you later.” He kissed her with feigned passion and left.

He made the drive in his bright cocky Jaguar from New York, by way of the Turnpike and the Raritan Bridge, in just over an hour. Arthur Rademacher’s imposing house was set back from a curving street in Edison amid its own miniature rain forest. Carrying a thin attache case, he walked up to the door, straightened his jacket, made sure his smile was on straight, and rang.

Ethel Rademacher was a stout, elderly woman with blue hair and a Rushmorean countenance; she gave her imperious caw of welcome and admitted him, explaining that the servants had retired for the night. It made him smile slightly; he knew the Rademachers had dismissed the last of their live-in staff some time ago. It was necessary for Mrs. Rademacher to keep up pretenses, and that was both ridiculous and a point in Wyatt’s favor.

Arthur Rademacher was on his feet in the drawing room, an old man whose white hair and eyebrows had the flowing fineness of the formerly blond. Wyatt crossed the room with long masculine strides to shake his hand. “You look good, Arthur.”

The old man gave him a quick, firm handshake, said, “I’ve got a new taxidermist,” and spoke to his wife: “We’ll be in my office.” And showed Wyatt into the private office with a flourish.

By choosing a chair other than the customary one, Wyatt intended to throw the old man off balance. But if the trick had effect, Arthur Rademacher gave no sign of it. He settled into his high leather chair with the slow movements of incipient arthritis, a gaunt antique with eyes gone pale with watery age. He had to swivel his chair to face the younger man, and when he did, he had Steve Wyatt against a lamp in silhouette. Nonetheless, Wyatt veiled his eyes when he said with false geniality, “It was good of you to see me at this hour.”

The old man sucked on his teeth to keep them in place. “Quite all right, Steve boy. I’m so old they don’t trust me with much work anymore-a few papers to push around on the desk, that’s about all. In any event, I’ve always got time for Fran Wyatt’s boy. It’s been too long since I’ve seen you. Well, then, what’s this business matter that’s so urgent it needs discussing on a Saturday evening?”

“Well, sir, you see, I’ve been approached with an offer for an excellent position.”

“Very glad to hear it.”

“But it seems I need your help.”

“My help?” The old man moved a hand in a self-deprecating gesture. “I doubt there’s much I can do any more, you know.”

“The fact is, I’ve been offered a job that doesn’t exist yet. It can come into existence only with your help. Now, I understand you were approached a few days ago by representatives of Nuart Galleries with an offer to-”

“Absurd,” the old man snapped, cutting him off. “The whole thing was absurd. They incorporate their damned firm one day and they want to buy Melbard the next. It’s absurd. Put an old-line company like Melbard in the hands of those Madison Avenue upstarts and it would fall apart overnight. They deal in nothing but sham and pretense, those people-art fashions and fads that change from one minute to the next; what could they know about anything as solid and sturdy as Melbard?”

“Sir, we thought that might be the reason why you turned down the offer. That’s why I’ve come to see you.”

“You? Involved with that pack of Madison Avenue frauds?” The old man shaped his mouth with delicious cruel emphasis around the words “Madison Avenue,” as if they were the foulest epithet in the language.

Wyatt thought, The old fart. He made his voice conciliatory: “Well, sir, after all, it is Elliot Judd’s daughter who owns Nuart. We’re not really talking about a gang of young opportunists without background or breeding, are we? From what I understand, it wouldn’t hurt Melbard Chemical to have an infusion of Judd money. Besides, Elliot Judd is a big stockholder in Melbard-we’d only be keeping it in the family, in a manner of speaking.”

“Then why not keep it in the Melbard family-my family?” The old man snorted. He had a disturbing trick of clicking his false teeth like castanets. Either he hadn’t heard of, or didn’t want to bother with, denture adhesives. He said, “I certainly don’t see what makes Melbard Chemical so desirable to your Madison Avenue friends. It’s hardly in their line.”

“But you’d have to agree it’s a good investment-a sound company. All it needs is an injection of capital to build on.”

“Got capital enough of its own,” the old man said curtly. “How did you get involved in this, anyway?”

“They wanted someone who knew corporate finance,” Wyatt lied. “You see, the job I’ve been offered-it’s the presidency of Melbard, provided, of course, it can be bought by Nuart.”

The old man bridled immediately. His eyes narrowed; his face became hard and shrewd. He yanked open a desk drawer and took out an old meerschaum pipe with a badly chewed stem, and clenched it unlit between his teeth, supporting the bowl with one hand.

Wyatt said, “I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I don’t. I just use it to remind me to keep my mouth shut when I’m confronted by something I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t think it was hard to understand at all, sir.”

“Isn’t it? You tell me if I’m wrong, Steve, boy-it seems unconscionable to me. They’re trying to bulldoze me by using you as a lever against me. They must know it would go against my grain, against my family ties, to stand in your way. But it must have occurred to you that for me to sell out to your friends would go just as much against my grain. After all, if you become president of Melbard, what happens to James Melbard?”

“He moves up to board chairman. He’s ready to retire anyway-he’s said so. Nobody wants to buy all his stock-he’ll keep his seat on the board, and he’ll remain chairman as long as he chooses to.”

“A titular job, of course? You’d be in charge of operations, as president?”

“Well, yes. Of course, sir. Nuart would have a majority of the votes on the board. Naturally they’d be inclined to support me if a dispute came up between me and Mr. Melbard. But I assure you I’d be anxious to cooperate with him-after all, he knows this business better than I do.”

Rademacher closed his mouth around the pipestem; he leaned back in the high-backed leather chair and closed his eyes. Wyatt, after a little while, made an elaborate sweeping arc with his arm, and looked at his watch; finally the old man opened his eyes, straightened his chair up, and said bluntly, “No. I won’t do it. I’m sorry.”

Wyatt nodded slowly. The old man took down his meerschaum and tried to work his teeth into a comfortable position. It was not beyond probability that he would, any minute now, decide to take them out.

Wyatt’s eyes, which the old man could not see against the lamp behind him, expressed their contempt for Rademacher; in a quiet, slow way, his upper-crust voice slurring, Wyatt said, “Under the terms of the proposal I’m authorized to make, you’d receive stock options in the new corporation-you’d be granted the right, for ten years, to buy ten thousand shares of Nuart stock at ten dollars a share. We have every reason to believe it will be three or four times that price within a year, let alone ten years. On a cash investment of a hundred thousand dollars, you’ll be able to show a capital gain of anywhere from one to five hundred thousand within a very few years. And of course, if I’m wrong, if the stock declines in price during the option period, it will have cost you nothing, since you’re not required to exercise your option-you don’t have to buy the stock. Heads you win, tails you don’t lose. The option will be transferable to your heirs, of course.”

The pipe was back in Rademacher’s mouth. Around it, he said softly, “I told you not to bulldoze me. What makes you think I’d accept an underhanded chance to increase my own fortunes that way at my brother-in-law’s expense?”

“Not at his expense, sir. He’ll get the same stock option you get. Nobody stands to lose.”

“Nevertheless, it’s an effort to corrupt me-to bribe me with stock options. What must you think of me? An old fool, yes, perhaps-but a common chiseler?”

Wyatt’s voice began to harden. “Everybody chisels, Arthur. It’s only a question of need and time and motive. We all start out honest-we all see how easy it would be to give the suckers a shearing, but we’re too decent to take advantage of them. Our consciences hold us back. But then some of us get pushed into a corner-bills we’ve got to pay, or grandchildren who need money for medical care or university tuition, or a relative who needs an expensive lawyer. Am I getting warm, sir?”

Stiff in his chair, the old man muttered, “You’re a wretch, Steve boy. A scoundrel. How did you find out?”

“What does that matter? You need money, Arthur. You’re not nearly as rich as you want your family to think. You need it very fast, because you don’t know how long you’re going to live. You’ve been thinking about it for quite some time. And it won’t be the first time, will it? Forty years ago you saw a way to get money, and you must have explained very carefully to yourself how the suckers were just asking for it, just begging for it, and you might as well take it away from them, because if you didn’t, somebody else would.”

The old man’s jaws were bunched on the pipe; his eyes were closed. Wyatt bounced to his feet and spoke from a semicrouch; his voice clacked abruptly: “September, nineteen-twenty-nine-you were a member of the board of directors of the Merchants and Maritime Trust, and you were present at a company meeting where the board decided to pay a reduced dividend. While the secretary went out of the room to type up the notification to the Stock Exchange, you excused yourself by pleading a call of nature. Only instead of going down the hall to the men’s room you got to a telephone and sold all your stock in the company and sold more short. You got out just in time. Half an hour later the news hit the ticker, and the Exchange was swamped with sell orders-trading was suspended for two hours, and the stock reopened down several points. You made good your short sales and cleared a half-million dollars. Isn’t that how it happened, Arthur? And didn’t my grandfather, who was with you on that board of directors, cover up what you’d done?”

Rademacher, eyes shut, was dry-washing his clasped hands. Mottled veins stood out on his wrists. He drew in a long ragged breath, and his gaunt old frame shuddered when he let it out.

Slowly he opened his desk drawer and put the meerschaum away in it, closed the drawer deliberately, and looked up, his eyes devoid of expression. He said, “I won’t waste the energy it would take to call you names. What do you want of me?”

“Your quarter-million shares of Melbard, at the market price. And your affidavit relinquishing your option on James Melbard’s quarter-million shares.”

“Of course,” the old man muttered to himself. Without further discussion, he turned to the phone and dialed a number. He composed his face into a slack-muscled smile, so forced he looked as if he had been posing too long for a slow photographer.

Wyatt picked up his attache case and opened it on his lap. Rademacher began to talk into the phone in an exhausted, defeated voice: “Hello, James. I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour, but something’s come up… No, nothing like that. Look, James, I’ve done some questionable things in my lifetime, but I’ve never been a treacherous man, so I think I’m going to have to give you fair notice before I sell you out… Let me finish, please. Certain facts have come to my attention which have caused me to change my mind about the Nuart tender… Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. I’m going to sign my control over to them. I wanted you to know… No. I’m really quite tired, James, can’t we discuss it in daylight? Very well. I’ll speak to you tomorrow. Good night.”

Wyatt pushed the documents across the desk and handed the old man a pen.

“I am tempted,” Arthur Rademacher said, “to scrawl a big fat X on this dotted line, sir.”

But he signed. Wyatt slid the papers into his case, snapped it shut, went out of the office, and shut the door softly behind him.